this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Ryujinx, Dolphin, Mupen64, Cemu, Visual Boy Advance, BizHawk, RetroArch, Snes9x, Mesen, and others are emulators of Nintendo consoles that have not been taken down by Nintendo.
There are some important rules to follow if you want to make an emulator. Yuzu made some big mistakes. It's legal to build an emulator. It's not legal to profit from encouraging from piracy, or circumventing DRM which is what Yuzu did.
any switch emulator, and dolphin have to circumvent drm or encryption to work. dolphin literally includes the decryption keys yet nintendo hasnt tried to take them down, only when they warned valve about it. so they're all doing something illegal
And yet the project still is up.
Dolphin has a defense. There is a reverse engineering exemption to the DMCA that Dolphin is likely protected by. Dolphin's use of the keys might be entirely legal. If this went to court there's a reasonable chance Dolphin could win. It wouldn't be a clear-cut case at best.
The other thing protecting Dolphin is the fact Dolphin does not make money. They do not solicit donations publicly. Nintendo doesn't have easily citable patreon numbers to add to the damages, nor would Dolphin have the means to pay nintendo even if they won.
Taking Dolphin to court is a bad idea for nintendo. All risk, no reward. Keeps Dolphin safe unless one of those things changes, like putting it on steam.
It hasn't been determined by a court whether or not yuzu did anything wrong, they settled out of court.
They settled because they knew what would happen if it went to a court. Yuzu's actions were blatantly illegal.
It's also possible that Yuzu just didn't want to fight a legal battle which is expensive and very stressful. Chance of winning also obviously factor into that, but I don't see why it has to be the main reason.
They were making $30k a month from their patreon. That's enough money to afford a lawyer, and plenty of incentive to defend themselves in court if they genuine believed they weren't doing anything illegal.
Their patreon had custom builds of the emulator specifically tailored to run leaked games before release. In their own patreon, yuzu's developers admitted to having copies of nintendo's games at a time they could not be legally purchased. They also admitted to profiting from those illegally obtained ROMs for an amount that patreon shares publicly. That is the sort of slam-dunk evidence that would make nintendo's lawyers salivate.
This isn't an unclear situation. Yuzu was legally in the wrong. If this went to trial they would almost assuredly lose even more. If yuzu was doing more piracy there's no way to hide it during discovery.